The E-book of Love, Kelly Hyperlink’s first novel, is a love story, sure. It’s additionally a ghost story, and a coming-of-age story, and a portrait of a small city. It’s about magic and music and morality. It’s about how annoying siblings are, and the way a lot you want them. It’s a e book that comprises many books, that’s larger than the sum of its many components. Additionally it is, maybe, a e book that ought to have been a contact smaller.
The E-book of Love begins with three youngsters again from the useless: Sort A Laura, everlasting elder brother Daniel, inquisitive Mo. They’ve been in some unusual limbo, “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness,” for nearly a yr. They will’t bear in mind how they died. They don’t perceive how they occurred to come back again.
Their outdated music instructor, the enigmatic Mr. Anabin, appears to have some solutions, however he’s not keen to inform them a lot. As a substitute, he places them by means of a sequence of trials, informing them that in the event that they don’t full their duties efficiently, they’ll likely discover themselves again in limbo. Helpfully, Mr. Anabin additionally enchants all of the revenants’ mates and households in order that they imagine them to have been finding out overseas as a substitute of useless — though Susannah, Laura’s rebellious sister and Daniel’s ex-girlfriend, appears to cherish some suspicions regardless of all of the magic.
The thriller of what occurred to the three youngsters offers Hyperlink with the skeleton of a plot, however she is nearly palpably bored with fixing it. Hyperlink, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and Pulitzer finalist for her quick tales, appears to be most invested in ambiance and character work, and he or she’s developed an excellent showcase for each expertise together with her setting for The E-book of Love: the small city of Lovesend.
Lovesend is a seaside city in Massachusetts. The native membership is constructed out of a airplane hangar on the cliffs made iconic for its indoor carousel; the meals is mediocre. The espresso store is known as What Hast Thou Floor, and its proprietor has a coverage of cultivating good espresso and a nasty ambiance so folks don’t linger too lengthy. Music all the time appears to be taking part in someplace, as if Lovesend is Prospero’s Island. The place is already somewhat unusual, somewhat unearthly, lengthy earlier than magic arrives.
After that, statues begin climbing off their plinths and strolling round and folks begin climbing onto the plinths and turning into statues. There’s a boy who turns into moths and seagulls. There’s a cat who, grooming itself, begins to swallow its leg, after which retains going, swallowing its entire physique till it has swallowed even its smile, “rosy moist gullet snapping collectively like a fanged coin purse,” a type of nightmarishly fleshy Cheshire Cat.
As wonders and horrors struggle their approach throughout the web page, Hyperlink strikes from character to character. Every chapter of this novel is given an nearly biblical “e book of” title — The E-book of Laura, the E-book of Susannah, the E-book of Lovesend. The majority of the novel is given over to the e book of the primary characters, however Hyperlink periodically turns the pages to the books of among the different residents of Lovesend, like a person who’s been became a tiger or a teen lesbian on whom Laura is madly crushing.
Most stunning and efficient of all is The E-book of Maryanne, Mo’s grandmother, a speeding kaleidoscope of a chapter that follows Maryanne all through her life. We see her early profession as a Black romance novelist writing white heroines underneath a pen identify, her successes and her failures, the lack of her daughter and the arrival of Mo. “Time,” thinks Maryanne, “is a row of small and hateful stitches.”
It’s exhausting to not assume, The E-book of Maryanne, of a really transient and unusual and delightful quick story, the type at which Hyperlink excels. She’s been writing for many years now, however The E-book of Love is her first novel. Chapters like The E-book of Maryanne make me surprise if The E-book of Love wouldn’t have felt somewhat extra stunning and extra magical as a novel in tales reasonably than the sprawling 625-page saga Hyperlink has delivered us. Often, you’re feeling somewhat stab of discomfort with the shape as you go.
This can be a slow-moving e book. It takes 89 pages for Mo, Laura, and Daniel to make their approach by means of their first night time again from the useless, and 125 pages after that for a single character to find any solutions concerning the central mysteries. Then that character promptly will get their reminiscence magically revised, a transfer Hyperlink repeats so typically that it begins to really feel nearly comical.
At occasions the sluggish place works as a approach of exploring this richly textured small city, these deeply realized love tales. At different occasions it feels willfully sluggish, info withheld for no purpose till it turns into time for exposition to be dumped inelegantly onto the web page. For a author of Hyperlink’s items, such clumsiness is jarring. For those who’re new to Hyperlink’s work, it may be price testing her intricate and twisting quick tales, a type over which she has full mastery, earlier than you come to this odd novel.
Nonetheless, Hyperlink’s items are pretty extraordinary on their very own. If The E-book of Love is flawed, it’s additionally one thing unusual and delightful and shimmering.
